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Ruthless Young Man

Michael Brock, 14 September 1989

Churchill: 1874-1922 
by Frederick Earl of Birkenhead, edited by Sir John Colville.
Harrap, 552 pp., £19.95, August 1989, 0 245 54779 7
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... and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just ...

Wrinkled v. Round

Andrew Berry: Gregor Mendel, 8 February 2001

A Monk and Two Peas: The Story of Gregor Mendel and the Discovery of Genetics 
by Robin Marantz Henig.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £14.99, June 2001, 0 297 64365 7
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... chromosomal locations are critical. When a pair is found on the same chromosome, the outcome of a cross is much less predictable than when it is on different chromosomes. Mendel, who died a year after chromosomes were first described, chose traits that happened to be on different chromosomes. The British geneticist R.A. Fisher once suggested that Mendel might ...

I am a false alarm

Robert Irwin: Khalil Gibran, 3 September 1998

Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet 
by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins.
One World, 372 pp., £18.99, August 1998, 1 85168 177 9
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Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran 
by Robin Waterfield.
Allen Lane, 366 pp., £20, August 1998, 0 7139 9209 3
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... and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic figures, often female’ and the ‘veil of mist as a symbol for the dim access the normal human mind has to higher worlds’. Most of Gibran’s ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and has been described by the Economist as ‘a cross between a think tank, a celebrity summer camp and a liberal arts college’. Every summer it holds a festival of ideas where the great and the good from governments, universities, corporations and foundations, as well as Hollywood celebrities with ...

At the Allenby Bridge

Jeremy Harding: Crossing the Jordan, 25 June 2009

... still. Even foreigners are treated to an intimation of these difficulties, especially once they cross the bridge and enter the thick press of people waiting to be dealt with by Israeli border security, the great majority Jordanian-based or West Bank Palestinians. Most of the festival people with security-friendly names or neutral birthplaces got through in ...

Protocols of Machismo

Corey Robin: In the Name of National Security, 19 May 2005

Arguing about War 
by Michael Walzer.
Yale, 208 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 0 300 10365 4
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Chain of Command 
by Seymour Hersh.
Penguin, 394 pp., £17.99, September 2004, 0 7139 9845 8
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Torture: A Collection 
edited by Sanford Levinson.
Oxford, 319 pp., £18.50, November 2004, 0 19 517289 2
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... Walzer acknowledges the moral power of the last resort argument – ‘political leaders must cross this threshold [going to war] only with great reluctance and trepidation’ – he suspects that it is often ‘merely an excuse for postponing the use of force indefinitely’. As a result, he says, ‘I have always resisted the argument that force is a ...

Diary

Patrick Hughes: What do artists do?, 24 July 1986

... Graphics. So I have a little pile of pieces of paper with ‘ideas’ roughly drawn on them: a cross with a pirate flag, a ghost caught on barbed wire, an egg on a tightrope, a cage in prison. Next to me I have a tea trolley with paints and water on it. I draw the picture in pen and ink, colour it in: if it works, I frame it. I can do about three a day at ...

Diary

John Kerrigan: Lost Shakespeare, 6 February 1986

... when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is – convincing. But no one has positively disproved Shakespeare’s involvement, and given the conventional nature of the lyric it’s hard to see how they could. If ...

That Tendre Age

Tom Johnson: Tudor Children, 15 June 2023

Tudor Children 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 265 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 26796 9
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... were sold as standalone pamphlets: in 1520 the Oxford bookseller John Dorne had A Little Gest of Robin Hood for tuppence, Robert the Devil for thruppence. Orme makes the suggestion that cheap ‘jest-books’, short collections of riddles and stories, can be seen as forerunners of children’s comics.Around the age of seven, a privileged few boys would move ...

Worm Interlude

Patricia Lockwood: What is a guy for?, 17 November 2022

Liberation Day 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 238 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 1 5266 2495 6
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 432 pp., £10.99, April 2022, 978 1 5266 2424 6
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... Indigenous perspective.’ So, ‘in an hour or so, Mr U returns, bearing history books. Sitting cross-legged near the Mod, he laboriously hand-inputs much new material intended to address adult son Mike’s critique re the paucity of Indigenous accounts.’Now comes something more interesting: the Pulse. The Pulse is described by our narrator, a Speaker ...
... to an audience of businessmen that her government had forced Europe to break down the barriers to cross-border business. By supporting a single European market in goods and services, she said, the Conservatives were taking action ‘to secure free movement of capital throughout the Community’. She saw no contradiction: those who claim to be her heirs still ...

Frog’s Knickers

Colin Burrow: How to Swear, 26 September 2013

Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing 
by Melissa Mohr.
Oxford, 316 pp., £16.99, May 2013, 978 0 19 974267 7
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... on formulaic elements, but needs to be precisely adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the ...

World in Spectacular Light

Hal Foster: Bauhaus in Exile, 5 December 2024

Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design across Borders 1930-60 
by Robin Schuldenfrei.
Princeton, 345 pp., £55, January 2024, 978 0 691 23266 9
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... redesigned chess pieces as representations of their movements on the board (his bishop is a cross of two diagonals): out with the old symbolism of feudal courts, in with the new formalism of pure function. In his Bauhaus summa, Von Material zu Architektur (1929), translated as The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy sketched the history of art as an evolution from ...

The Need for Buddies

Roy Porter, 22 June 2000

British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World 
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000, 0 19 820376 4
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... Georgian times, many were social, like the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, some debating, like the Robin Hood, while others were aesthetic, like the Society of Dilettanti. When, early in George III’s reign, the Duchess of Newcastle drew up her own guide to ‘what’s on in London’, she listed not merely theatres, pleasure gardens and so on, but ‘the ...

Getting back

Adrian Poole, 1 July 1982

A crowd is not company 
by Robert Kee.
Cape, 240 pp., £7.50, May 1982, 9780224020039
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Bedbugs 
by Clive Sinclair.
Allison and Busby, 109 pp., £6.95, May 1982, 0 85031 454 2
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New Writing and Writers 19 
John Calder, 262 pp., £6.95, April 1982, 0 7145 3811 6Show More
Zhenia’s Childhood 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Alec Brown.
Allison and Busby, 115 pp., £6.95, May 1982, 0 85031 466 6
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... resolving these feelings. One is the dedication: ‘To the memory of my friend Squadron Leader Ian Cross, DFC and those 49 of his fellow prisoners who were shot with him by Hitler’s orders on recapture after escaping from Stalag Luft III in 1944.’ The reader cannot remain unmoved by this and it is part of the experience of reading the book. It is difficult ...

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